One of the greatest results of my experience microdosing psilocybin in protocol* has been the shift in my thought life.
For 13 years I have been using mindfulness to work with intrusive thoughts. We can’t control that first thought but we can choose our second, third and subsequent thoughts.
I like the metaphor of your thoughts being a river floating by. If you saw a big pile of poop floating by would you grab onto it and float down river? Or would you instead find a better float for the journey? Your choice.
Changing the way you perceive yourself and the feeling tone of thoughts you have is like turning a big battleship in the ocean. You can’t just flip a U turn, it’s a slow intentional process.
It begins with self awareness, becoming the observer of your thoughts and then choosing them. YOU are not your thoughts. Meditation has helped me tons with that and starting with a shitty, inconsistent meditation practice over a decade ago has me now meditating three times a day (mostly).
What I have found most helpful in thought life work is mindful input. We become the five people we spend the most time around and the books we read. I believe you can choose someone you don’t even know to be in your top five influences by consciously consuming their creations.
An author is going to give you their BEST in a book not in an IG post, so spending less time scrolling and more time consuming intentional creations is a great place to start.
So is being mindful of people and things that feel “yucky” and hurt your self esteem. There’s a distinction from being challenged to think differently versus self-judgement being relentlessly normalized.
My brief experience following Kim Kardashian on snapchat years ago taught me how at war she was with her body. It never seemed good enough to her. I decided that wasn’t the influence I wanted so I made choices about unfollowing.
That’s just one example.
Does this person help me become who I want to be? I focus my five people on folks I admire and supportive friends who help me see myself with true delight. I’m lucky to have both in many people.
When I was first on the journey to love my body twenty something years ago it was pre-social media and I totally stopped watching TV. I posted pictures of happy fat people all around my house. The solution to pollution is dilution and after an adolescence of suicidal self loathing I needed to make a big change.
At 31 years old I thought I had done the work of self love because I loved my body. I had no idea how self abusive my thought life was until I started artist life coaching with Lynnee Breedlove. In our first session Lynnee asked me to speak to myself like I was a six year old child. I could NOT access tenderness for myself.
It was alarming to realize the self love mountain continued to loom ahead no matter how far I had come. It’s reassuring to me now to know that healing isn’t a destination. It’s a choice to live my journey a little bit kinder every day. (Same, too, with success. It’s a journey and it’s self-defined. I choose success for me to mean serenity.)
I am so grateful for all the work I’ve done and if I had realized it would take me 13 years to reach this milestone I probably never would have begun. But it was worth it!
During week seven of my first protocol under the guidance of Tamara of Mohala Yoga (get to know her offerings through Episode 145 of my podcast) I made a huge breakthrough in my thought life. I realized that my first thought used to be the one I needed to question. We are imprinted during ages 0-7 by our caregivers and mine believed that criticism is love. That is not true! Love and adoration and affirmation are love. Criticism is criticism.
For my whole life my first thought was the critical, self abusive one.
I realized in week 7 that my first thought was now my intuition. I had done so much work to connect to and identify that still, small voice. Much quieter than the inner critic. And now she comes in with more dominance. I still take the pause and consideration of my thoughts and impulses. (Responding vs reacting.) But the fact that my intuition is so dominant now is such a huge level up in my whole life experience.
The benefits of intentional use of psychedelics are many, including increased neuroplasticity. Your brain is more available for new pathways. Trauma and negative self talk create grooves in that gorgeous brain of yours and it can be hard to change.
It’s not as simple as just popping psilocybin, it is the conscious consistency of mindfulness practices that partner with the neuroplasticity to help create results swifter than on their own.
I am so grateful for this protocol helping to create these new grooves in my brain and I am SO grateful for Tamara’s microdosing cohorts (I have now completed two, thinking about a third) for helping me have a gorgeous peace of mind that is my definition of success.
Week 7 for me was back in December. I am still doing my protocol (it’s May now), have shifted strains a couple of times and am still experiencing the magic of my intuition front and center. That first strain was wavy caps (definitely intuition and spiritual connection), then I used Albino Tidal Wave (that seemed to help more with focus) and now using Golden Teachers (helps make my emotions easier to bear by making life a lil more sparkly).
Tamara is booking her Summer cohort now, if you’re considering taking this journey she is a guide who has a lot to offer!
Here’s a post about my week 3 microdosing psilocybin revelation!
If you’re interested in hearing more narratives about using psilocybin to heal, here is a treasure map of my podcast episodes interviewing people about just that!
*I want to underscore how essential it has been to be doing this in a specific protocol versus the occasional one-off usage. For a couple of years I was finding mental health relief by using what I would call a “party dose” every couple of weeks. But the big lasting shifts have come from microdosing a subperceptual dose regularly. I don’t feel it when I take the meds (it is like a brain vitamin) but the aggregate effect makes a huge difference.
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